Monthly Archives: May 2012

If I had a million dollars, I would buy a large piece of land and start a therapeutic community garden. I would like it to be a place of healing for survivors of trauma. Yes, they would have to work a little in the garden. Not like slaves or cult members; their work in the garden would be therapy.

It’s not an original idea. It is the idea that makes my heart leap when I try to answer the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I’ve asked myself this question repeatedly throughout my life, and find myself asking it more and more often. I’m way beyond grown up, and the question should have been answered years ago. But I’m not a machine, and the question has not been answered and may never be answered. I know successful people have goals and timelines and they never say die yada-yada-yada. A successful person would not be asking this question at my age. Whatever.

Back to the garden!

The therapeutic community garden I envision would have both individual allotments and group areas. Counselors would need to have basic horticultural knowledge in addition to their psychotherapy training. Counselors would work in the garden with clients, and these encounters would build trust while allowing issues to arise.

To join this therapeutic community, a client must understand and agree that issues will be addressed, therapy will happen everywhere, not only at a desk. And because therapeutic community is a group process, clients would also work with one another, and therapists would not be rigidly assigned to individual clients. The client and therapist roles would be fluid.

Why gardening to heal trauma? Because trauma dissociates the mind and body, and working with the earth reunites them. Merely talking does not heal the body or bring the mind to rest in it. A body injured learns defensive habits; some injuries cause disabilities. A physical therapy/bodyworker component could be part of the practice.

Trauma survivors need to act out. They need a safe space with imaginary walls strong enough to withstand their emotional torrents and permeable enough to filter out all the poison. A garden is a great object to attach projections to, because it is not going to participate in an unhealthy relationship. A few plants may die, but it’s not the end of the world; no cycle of violence is perpetuated.

There is gentleness even in violence in the garden. A natural occurrence is never personal or abusive. A hurricane has no intention, a flood has no will. Horrific as they might be, natural disasters lack the personal component which makes torture, rape, and human aggression so irreversibly wounding. Plants are never violent.

There’s so much violence in the world, and so little space for healing. We have spaces for everything else. We have spaces for shopping, for drinking, for working out, for watching bands, for playing games, for getting smart, and of course hospitals for getting the body well enough to go home. But where do we go for true healing? The church is an option for a small number of people, but I would argue that the conformity demanded by any creed makes a church’s value negligible.

I’d like to start a Space for Healing, a community garden one could join for free. I’d like to see it right here in Detroit, where there is plenty of vacant land and there are more than enough terribly wounded souls. I’m excited by urban agriculture, but this would be more than a farm. Its purpose would be more than food production. It would be an intentional community, a space set apart for beauty and healing and becoming whole.

There were so many things I could have done today. The closet door needs to be fixed, both of the cat trees need to be re-wrapped with rope for scratching, I certainly could have vacuumed and/or mopped, dust can always be found somewhere if you peer closely enough, and weeds can always be found in some nook or crevice. Laundry can always be done, pictures can always be drawn, and cats can always be petted: there is no end to the things that one needs to constantly accomplish.

And yet, doesn’t one need time to dream?

When the milkweed fills in and blooms, I’ll be spending my free time here: My butterfly garden is next to the patio, so the butterflies get up close and personal when the nectar plants start to bloom. As host plants I have three types of milkweed, also dill, parsley, clover, asters, and joe pye weed. For nectar and visual pleasure I have Buddleia, verbena, Marguerite daisies, Scabiosa, Casablanca lilies, and columbines. The pink garden extends the habitat with coneflowers, more asters, Filipendula, a giant Eupatorium, and a plum tree.

I’m sure there are other wonderful native plants I’ve forgotten to mention – oh, like the elderberry and Aronia! How could I forget! They both provide shrubby cover and produce berries for the birds.

The milkweed is coming in like gangbusters this year compared to the past. Here’s the most finicky one, Asclepias incarnata: You have to understand, this time last year I could barely see a few tiny stalks peeking above the mulch. These are luscious clumps for May! The flowers on this plant are like monarch heroin. When it’s blooming there’s always monarchs hanging around, and I have seen up to five in the yard at once. Every bug in the city seems to gather round. It’s like a bug rave by midsummer.

Five monarchs seem like nothing compared to thousands at their migration site in Mexico, or even twenty or more at some of the other Monarch Waystations, but the delight comes in the immediacy of stepping out my own back door into a functioning habitat. It’s not an island paradise, but it is a sort of oasis, an island of live green space in which to float and dream of a world filled with beauty.

Time to dream should not be a precious commodity only enjoyed while on vacation. Dream space is an essential nutrient, and should be part of everyday life, so the mind, like a butterfly, can sip some nectar from every different flower.

Like this:

I’m the girl who skipped too many of her science classes with the foolish idea that Art with a capital A was the only thing that mattered. Yes, that’s me, the big idiot who missed out on knowledge and experience that might have made her life turn out So Much Better. I’m not saying I didn’t like science, especially science fiction; I was reading JG Ballard in high school for fun. But all my science classes involved memorizing lists and letters and numbers. No one ever talked about ideas. No one mentioned that science involves constant questioning. No teacher ever said, now class, I’m going to teach you about all the things we don’t know.

Like what is light made of? No one knows. Physicists have all kinds of theories, but no one knows what light actually is.

And how do butterflies metamorphose inside a chrysalis? We have a word for the transformation, and we know they liquefy and reorganize inside the chrysalis; but we don’t know how the caterpillar becomes a completely different creature. I don’t want to get all Silence of The Lambs creepy about it, but science is pretty seductive and amazing when you start thinking about Lepidoptera. Science starts sharing an edge with mythology and art when you start thinking about transformation. Science seems exciting, like poetry and magic.

I guess this is my mid-life crisis talking, looking for poetry and magic in the shabby graying ubiquitously ten pounds overweight rambling VW bus that is my life. Don’t we all look for poetry and magic? God I hope so. I hope there are not people out there who feel fine without any beauty in their lives.

A well-functioning butterfly garden looks a lot like a woman going through a mid-life crisis. Things are a little disheveled, a little overgrown; certain areas are unkempt or weedy. The butterfly gardener knows which weeds feed the butterflies and caterpillars. Cleaning up too much would destroy the habitat. It takes a bit of a mess for beautiful butterflies to emerge.

An Eastern Black Swallowtail emerged from the lavender yesterday. She didn’t fly out. She climbed up as high as she could go, and fluttered her wings while holding a branch. Then she climbed around some more, slowly pumped her wings, fluttered again, and then took off for the lilac bush. She didn’t make it. She flailed through the air and fell into the grass. She climbed and fluttered her wings, choosing taller and taller blades of grass. Her wings appeared completely intact, and I realized she must have just hatched and was drying out her wings and learning to fly.

In her last attempt before success, she landed on my leg, used it to climb up high, and then took off into the sky towards the trees.

With a life span of two to six weeks, a butterfly learns to fly once. With a lifespan of up to ninety years, a person does it again, and again, and again

An homage to Jeff Lowenfels’ and Wayne Lewis’ “Teaming With Microbes,” perhaps the most important book about gardening I have ever had the pleasure of reading. They explain how the nutrients and disease-controls created in the soil by the presence of bacteria, protozoa, fungi, and other organisms prove vastly superior to all chemicals; and how by encouraging micro-organisms, a gardener can re-establish the natural balance and health in the soil which makes chemicals obsolete.

To dig, or not to dig, that is the question:Whether ‘tis nobler in the yard to sufferThe clods and furrows of outrageous topsoilOr to take hoe against a bed of compost,And by upturning blend them. To dig-to till-To chore; and by this chore to say we endThe compact and the thousand natural weedsThat dirt is heir to. ‘Tis a cultivationDevoutly to be wished. To dig-to till.To kill-perchance a worm: ay, there’s the rub!For in that churned up earth what worms may comeWhen we have shoveled up this fertile soil,Must give us pause. There’s the respectThat heeds diversity of soil borne life.For who would tear the worms from head to hind,The rhizosphere’s mob, the strong root’s exudate,The paths of nematodes’ hunt, the long hyphae,The excellence of fungi, and the healthThat teeming soil with its bacteria makes,When life itself might its nutrients takeFrom our fair garden? Who would these marvels tear,To grunt and sweat rototilling away life,But that the dread of formal structure’s death-The all-organic garden, in whose wildsNo fertilizer burns-doubles our till,And makes us rather dig those hills we haveThan pile up layers of mulch and compost?Thus science does make stewards of us all,And thus the native course of evolutionIs given pow’r to reclaim what was lost,And biologies of great strength and balanceWith millions of bacteria boldly thriveAnd bloom with satisfaction.